Avocado and date salad

I will build my love a salad. First of all I will wash fresh stalks of celery in cold water and slice them diagonally.



I will build a tower of goodness from ripe avocado, crystalised dates, and dried bananna chips.



And on it I will lay wedges of strong salty cheese, and whole corriander seeds. For a dressing there will be fresh ground black pepper, white garlic sauce, and a drizzle of virgin olive oil.



I will lay it on a table of linen, and pour a glass of strong red wine, full heady tannin, that will sing a love song to the cheese.

Pasha & Kulich

Pasha & Kulich, originally uploaded by HyperBob.

Pasha is spread on the kulich and eaten.
Pasha is a very rich.

No!!! to say it is rich is a lie.

Pasha is a heart attack on a plate.
Pasha is the gunge that will clog your arteries.
Pasha has so much sugary sweetness it will have you running up the walls.
Pasha explodes in your mouth.
Pasha tingles your toes and gives you pins and neddles in your fingers.
Pasha makes you dance with schitzoid jerky movements.
Pasha is dangerous and should only be eaten by people who have practiced extreme eating for years.
Pasha is the nipple of heaven.

If food were flags

If food were flags then a tomato boat carrying a wedge of feta as cargo under the full sail of a basil leaf would represent Italy. The colours are right and the taste is right too. For the lion rampant of Scotland you would have custard and strawberries. The English would have milk and beetroot juice, and the Americans would have a blueberry pie topped with a triple helping of double cream, and an obscene amount of glazed cherries.

The sad thing is that things are being grown for looks rather than flavour. Shelf life is more important than taste. It is a given that tomatoes are red, but what is the point of selling nice red tomatoes when the price is all wrong. If you have a glut of tomatoes on the market then you get rock bottom prices for them.

So what you do genetically engineer them to remain green on the vine for a longer period of time, and when the price is right you pump ethelyene into the green house and have them ripen overnight, and then sell them at top dollar. They might be rock hard and taste like sewage, but they sure as hell look good on the supermarkert shelves.

If Peru had a flag it should be shaped like a potato, and potatoes should be knobbly with vivid strange colours, just the way nature intended, but no they need to have a certain shape if they have to be made into Walkers crisps, and Walkers will only buy certain types of potato which means that growers will only grow certain potatoes so they can sell them to Walkers. The end result is that the old varieties disappear.

The same is true for wheat and rice. Varieties are bred to be high yielding, but only if you use lots of fertilizer. This is why the big chemical companies are buying up seed companies, since seeds are being designed to grow well with chemicals. Who cares about the diminished gene pool? Who cares that the genetic heritage of the generations is being fed to pigs, because modern seeds give better yields and more profit. Who worries that there might be huge swathes for land devoted to mono-cultures of corn or rice. With mono-cultures the risk is that if they are hit by disease like a fungal rust then there exists the distinct possibility that entire crops will be wiped out from japan to India.

I am all for genetic diversity. I am all for taste. I want wierd shaped fruit with stange colours, that does not have a shelf-life and needs to be eaten fresh. Give me a basil tomato boat with a cargo of feta, floating on a sea of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Give me taste.

Strawberries and black forrest ham on a poppy seed roll

Why not? If things taste good on their own them why not combine them, and see if the combination opens any doors. Hmmm that roll with poppy seeds would burst a saloon door wide open. Those small wild strawberries would cause the camera eyed doors on the Sar wars DeathStar blink open, and if you laid a few slices of German black forest ham on the combination lock at Fort Knox it would blow those vault doors wide open.

Put them all together, bite into them and they prove to be the key that opens Pandora's other box, you know the one she kept under her bed covered with a red silk shawl. The box of pleasures that we are not allowed to taste.

I eat everything. I eat the forbidden. I eat crusts and burnt bits. The brown burnt egg stuck to the bottom of life's pan. I lick the bowl. I eat raw dough. I finger melted chocolate from the pan. I drizzle olive oil on green leaves, shake rock salt on fish heads, suck marrow from the bone, tear crisp spiced brown skin from the bone, squeeze mustard on hot pork, mash bannana on white bread and sprinkle it with sugar.

You ask why I do it and I reply. Why not?

God's blow-out.

Here is a thought for you. It comes from the old testiment. It is in actual fact a command from God, and it goes like this.

And thou shall bestow that money for whatsosever your soul lusteth after, for oxen, for sheep, or for wine, or for stong drink, or for whatever thy soul desireth, and thou shall eat there before the Lord they God, and thou shalt rejoice, thou and thy entire household

If I get it right there are times when you take the tithe ( a tenth of your income ) and instead of giving it away, you use it to have a good time with your family and friends. Now that is quite radical thinking


So here is what I am suggesting that when pay day comes along you forget about the rent and the bills and the other financial matters that weigh you down, and set aside one tenth of your salary to buy some really good food to share with your friends and family.

Don't blow the money on a resturant. You can make better meals at home. Cooking together is good. It does not have to be French cuisine, but what it does need to be is tasty. Lip smacking good. Finger licking good. Fresh tomatoes spiked with sea salt and placed on buttered bread straight from the oven is heavenly. Whole cloves of garlic drenched in olive oil. Scarred and charred salmon has that smokey oily tang that makes you want to take the flesh in your mouth and suck, and suck, and suck, until all the flavour has been drawn out






At the end of the meal there should only be bones left. Every bit of goodness should be devoured and savoured. And after the meal... lick each others fingers... you would not get away with that in a resturant.

You know it is what God wants... so do it.

The vampire challenge

Imogen I eat you, originally uploaded by HyperBob.

It all started out in a very innocent manner. I had found a photo by Imogen Cunningham called three vegetables, and as part of a Utata project I dug around in the fridge for three vegetables I could photo, and came across some cloves of garlic that had began to sprout.

So I snaped the garlic and since I had taken it out and it looked so nice I decided to spice it up and bake it in the over along with some potatoe wedges.

I went and bought some fillet steak to go along with it and I used some Nomu African rub to give it some edge.

Can you eat so much garlic in one go? Yes of course you can. The cloves go wonderfully soft and almost caramelised. I do not recommend using a knife and fork to get at the innards, instead use your fingers and suck all the goodness out of them.

If I were a Vampire I wonder how I would react to a nicely done RARE steak with garlic on the side. I think it would be tempting and off-putting at one and the same time. The luciousness of the red meat and the horror of the garlic, but I think that good food inherently has a tension within it. It almost dares you to be brave enough to eat it.